He is the spit 'n image of his chum Al Gore right down to the fact that both their fathers voted against the Civil Rights Act and both have lived a life of venomous guilt ever since.
Gore stumbled and bumbled his way into and out of politics, changing his persona every week or with every speech, whichever came first, 'cause he couldn't bare the stink of the Old Man still about him.
And Simpson, the grand cornpone wit of Washington---dear God the mincemeat a Twain would have made of him---has spent fifty years loathing no one so much as a conservative Republican precisely because all his fathers' conservative colleagues recognized the Old Bigot for what he was.
He was the angry coddled son of a foolish prominent man and remains so to this day.
From Wikipedia:
In Simpson’s words to this Court, “I was a monster.”
One day in Cody, Wyoming, when Simpson was in high school, he and some friends “went out to do damage.” They went to an abandoned war relocation structure and decided to “torch” it. They committed arson on federal property, a crime now punishable by up to twenty years in prison if no one is hurt, and punishable by up to life in prison if the arson causes a person’s death. Luckily for Simpson, no one was injured in the blaze.
Simpson not only played with fire, but also with guns. He played a game with his friends in which they shot at rocks close to one another, at times using bullets they stole from the local hardware store. The goal of the game was to come as close as possible to striking someone without actually doing so. Again, Simpson was lucky: no one was killed or seriously injured.
Simpson and his friends went shooting throughout their community. They fired their rifles at mailboxes, blowing holes in several and killing a cow. They fired their weapons at a road grader. “We just raised hell,” Simpson says.
Federal authorities charged Simpson with destroying government property and Simpson pleaded guilty. He received two years of probation and was required to make restitution from his own funds – funds that he was supposed to obtain by holding down a job.
He did that in a rural area of the west in the late 1940s. Boys will be boys.
But you forgot the afterwards part. He’s earned a lot more respect than the Cheney brat.
“Alan Simpson graduated from Cody High School in Cody, Wyoming, in 1949 and attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1950 for a postgraduate year. He graduated in 1954 from the University of Wyoming with a Bachelor of Science degree and in 1958 with a Juris Doctor. In 1954 he married the former Susan Ann Schroll, who was a fellow UW student from Greybull, Wyoming. He served in the United States Army in Germany from 1955 to 1956 with the 10th Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division and with the 12th Armored Infantry Battalion, Second Armored Division.”